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Updated: July 24, 2025
He carried a bundle containing a gift skins of the young eider-duck to make an undergarment for his lady-love, two plump little auks with which to gratify her palate, and a bladder of oil to wash them down and cause her heart to rejoice. Good fortune favoured this brave man, for he met Oblooria at a lonely part of the shore among the boulders.
The form of its beak and nostrils, length of foot, and even the colouring of its plumage, show that this bird is a petrel: on the other hand, its short wings and consequent little power of flight, its form of body and shape of tail, the absence of a hind toe to its foot, its habit of living, and its choice of situation, make it at first doubtful whether its relationship is not equally close with the auks.
The funny little puffins, with their red, parrot-like bills, were peering anxiously out of the crevices; while the curious little auks, standing erect in rows like black and white mannikins, were exceedingly perturbed; and the kittiwakes flew screaming from the rocky shelves, joining their voices to the hoarser cries of the guillemots and the booming of the waves among walls and pillars of rock.
In this process, the bodies of thousands of auks were burned as fuel, in working up the remains of tens of thousands of others. On Funk Island, a favorite breeding-place, the great auk was exterminated in 1840, and in Iceland in 1844. Many natives ate this bird with relish, and being easily captured, either on land or sea, the commercialism of its day soon obliterated the species.
Joy flushed the natives' skin, for a thin film of sunlight trembled low over the eastern horizon. As they sped northward past great promontories they saw several auks. Later two ptarmigan were spotted, and still later an eider duck. They began chanting songs of the race.
Eider-ducks, chattering kittiwakes, and graceful tern, auks, guillemots, puffins, geese, and even swans, swarmed on the islands, far and near, while seals, whales, narwhals, dolphins, and grampuses, revelled in the sea, so that the Arctic world appeared almost overcharged with animal life.
All along the coast the birds are nearly as numerous as the fishes, and many islands are solely occupied by them as breeding-places. Their numbers are beyond calculation, consisting of petrels, swans, geese, pelicans, auks, gulls, and divers. These last are more particularly of the duck family, of which there are over thirty distinct species in and about this immediate region.
All the kwans, the Khootznoos, the Hoonahs, the Chilkats, the Auks, Stikines, Kakes and others, joined with the Sitkas in the hatred of the Russians. Parties going out from the fort at Sitka for hunting expeditions, for cutting of wood, for traveling to the Hot Springs, had to be on their guard and with arms at hand prepared to fight at a moment's notice.
Above the promontories millions of auks again made black clouds against the sky, eider ducks floated on the molten waters of sheltering fjords, along the icy shores puffins, with white swelling breasts, sat in military line, guillemots cooed their spring love songs and fulmar gulls uttered amorous calls, on the green slopes the white hare of the arctic gambolled, and tiny bears, soft and silken flossed, played at the entrances of moss-ensconced caves.
But there was nothing horrible there to Aleck who in every case turned inland to skirt the chasm, gazing down with interest the while at the nesting-places of the sea-birds which covered nearly every ledge, each one being alive with screaming, clamouring, hungry young, straining their necks to meet the swift-winged auks and puffins that darted to and fro with newly-captured fish in their bills.
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